Did you know that the bags of sugar you’re buying at the grocery store can be made from two vastly different plants? They taste about the same in your coffee but they cook up differently. And that’s not the only reason to be certain that your granulated sugar is pure cane sugar and not made from sugar beets… Since 2008, all North American granulated sugar, except cane sugar, is made with GMOs. Sugar beets are primarily controlled by Monsanto and are a Round-up Ready seed. Scientists have not yet made genetic modifications to sugar cane so you can avoid the GMO’s in your sugar by checking that your label indicates that the product is made from sugar cane.

Current labeling law doesn't require a cane or beet designation on sugar and there are only a few large producers who are labeling their sugar with the vegetable source as pure cane: C&H, Domino, and Dixie Crystals are a few notable brands. While some producers are letting consumers know that they’re not using sugar beets to create their product, other refiners decline for various reasons.

Sugar Cane on Flickr by c.mcbrien

For store brands the primary reason is simple: they don’t produce the sugar and they base the chosen refinery on commodity price... so the cheapest supplier wins the store branding. If beet sugar is cheaper that’s what goes in the bag, if cane sugar happens to be less expensive the following week then that’ll be bagged up instead. It's totally random so the stores just can’t say on the label which refined sugar it contains from one bag to the next. Miriam Morgan at the San Francisco Chronicle did a blind taste test just to see if average folks could tell the difference between beet sugar and cane sugar. There appears to be an overwhelming response that cane sugar tastes better. So whether or not you care about genetically modified foods, you might still care about flavor.

But I encourage you to do a blind taste test of your own. Decided that you really prefer the beet sugar? Beets are super easy to grow so get some non-GMO seeds and get them started in your garden... here’s how to make your own beet sugar:

Let me tell you something about poultry... chickens will eat a lot more grain than ducks and ducks will eat more than geese when they have access to pasture. Some chickens can be pigs.

But recently, I noticed a serious uptick in grain consumption. Mind you, I'm raising a few turkeys for our Thanksgiving meal, several guinea fowl, and I have about twice as many juvenile chickens out there right now as "on staff" layer hens so I, naturally, thought that those babies (and those dang turkeys) were seriously gobbling up the chicken chow. I would fill all the bowls each morning and when I returned in the late afternoon the bowls were licked clean. The most surprising thing was that when I came into the henyard with the feed bucket I was mobbed by starving birds.

I thought... wow! that's over 25lbs of feed just in the morning, but I put out an extra tray of kibble for them.

Things are finally beginning to slow down a tiny bit here since breeding season is officially over this week. I can once again find a few moments to enjoy my tiny farm. The weather is absolutely perfect this morning... sunny, 68*, gentle breeze. Not like any other August I've ever experienced in Southern Maryland!

About Farmrgirl

Small town Calif. farm-girl leaves the ranch behind for many years of adventure at sea, travels the world, then moves to Washington DC in 2007 where she finds the perfect homestead to settle down: acres of secluded Southern Maryland woods where she goes granola by raising her quality of life, Mastiffs, ducks, chickens, and tomatoes {& one Bengal kitty}... sustainably.